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Maintaining a Personal Web Page While on the Job Market

Brian Leiter

A philosophy graduate student writes:

As a graduate student preparing for the academic job market, I've noticed that a significant number of my peers maintain personal webpages, where others can view their CV's, teaching portfolio documents, and perhaps even draft copies of their publications.  I've also noticed that some people include family photos and other personal anecdotes, which strikes me as unnecessary, and perhaps a bad idea to boot.  My questions about this, for your blog readers if possible, are:

-How helpful or important are personal websites to job market success?

-What sort of content should be on one's personal website?

-What sort of content should be avoided, aside from the obvious?

Building and maintaining a personal website is quite a bit of work, so it would be helpful for me, and I imagine other graduate students who are about to enter the market, to know how to approach the question of whether to have a personal website, and especially how much energy to devote to it.

Thoughts from readers welcome–both students/job seekers with experience, and faculty who have been involved in searches and perhaps had occasion to look at student homepages?

 

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25 responses to “Maintaining a Personal Web Page While on the Job Market”

  1. Gordon Hull

    I've only been involved with searches for my home department (French Studies) and for joint appointments with English and WGS, but I think the advice would transfer.

    I'm in favor of personal websites established early in one's career. Not only can't I see anything wrong with a website with CV, papers, and teaching materials, I think a simple, clean, well-laid-out one shows a certain sobriety of temperament and logico-aesthetic sense (let's let that stand for now as indicating a sense of "elegance" that lies behind the ability to use that term in talking about proofs and about personal style). The style of a website is like the style of clothes worn to an interview; it shows something about the style of the person in social interaction.

    Of course there are all sorts of things to be said about cultural capital here, but I don't see where a website is any different from clothes, accent, posture, mannerisms, and all other bits of habitus, which are going to be on display anyway. And writing style for that matter, well before any personal contact is made.

    As for expense, many universities now offer free server space for personal webpages. Or at least mine does, and I figure if LSU does, then lots of others must do too, since we're not exactly known as risk-takers down here.

    Reply
  2. John Basl

    I've had a website for quite some time and modified it for the job market. Looking at my website stats during my time on the market there were definite spikes in activity on the website during job market season. There were often visits from .edu domains that applied to. This was even more true during the flyout stage.

    Websites can be had very cheaply or for free, and I think many people are inclined to visit the sites of applicants.

    Reply
  3. Ed Engelmann

    For what it's worth, one could also create a page on academia.edu or linkedin.

    Reply
  4. Fritz Allhoff

    Having been on many search committees, I'm a big fan of candidate websites. First, they give a sense of personality that doesn't come through in files. Second, they're accessible from anywhere (e.g., your phone, when you're in a bar talking to colleagues about applicants and don't have files with you). Third, it takes a lot less time to make on than you think. Fourth, if you don't have one, you look out of date.

    As for what's on them: keep them simple. Too many people have way too much stuff on them, whether: extended discussion of unwritten–and sometimes unwritable–papers; pictures of dogs, babies, etc.; or long, self-indulgent statements about why you're a philosopher. The other thing I hate is announcements that you're on the job market, which we already know because we're on your website. These announcements can be somewhat benign in some cases, but often shade into the fully desperate.

    Reply
  5. Optomistic ABD

    I've heard from many professors that putting papers written as a graduate student online can work against you. For one thing, unless the papers on your site have been published in good/leading journals already, they are not likely to be of impressively high quality, and the more half-baked they are, the more they can hurt your application if search committee members read them. Whereas if they are published already, all that really matters is where they were published, and your CV will already include that information. In either case there is no need to put your papers online. Furthermore, you open yourself up to new areas of criticism, if for instance your site contains photos of yourself and you are not particularly photogenic (and most of us aren't). It's shallow but true that people care about such superficial matters. Or if your site belies your quirky political/social/religious inclinations. You might come off as a quack. Another worry is that by putting your research online before it is published you risk getting "scooped" (i.e., having others take your idea and run with it further and faster than you can).

    I suppose it can also look like pretentious posturing for those of us at Non-Leiterrific programs to have websites where our bios wax over-confidently about our philosophical acumen and interests.

    But I suppose if you are one of the good-looking, strong-publishing, successful candidates at top ranked programs, it probably can't hurt that much (just keep the politics and religion to a minimum).

    Reply
  6. Les Green

    I look at these when applicants have them and I do sometimes find them useful.

    But it should not be possible to tell from your personal website whether you are:

    married or single, right-wing or left-wing, straight or gay, child-free or mummy-daddy, religious or secular, disabled or not, etc.

    You might think that if you have pics of you skiing down Mount Everest with your husband, kids, manager from McDonald's, the sitting group from your sangha, all the while playing your baroque viola and drinking homemade elderflower wine you are bound to endear yourself to a hiring committee–but I wouldn't count on it.

    It isn't your school yearbook. Keep it simple. Save your human side for Facebook (which you should have carefully locked down—they will look).

    Reply
  7. Eddy Nahmias

    In my opinion, grad students (and job candidates) should have professional websites if (but only if) they have something to put there beyond research interests (and a barren CV). The websites should be professional, so little to no personal info and no pictures except perhaps one of yourself. They should include a statement of research interests, published or forthcoming papers, courses taught (with syllabi if possible), and CV link. Beyond that, you could include papers in progress or papers presented, but there are risks in doing that (such as those mentioned above). I tend to think the risks are not that significant (committee members don't have time to read a bunch of your papers and let's hope people aren't trolling websites to steal ideas and if they are they will be caught and banished). Personally, I think it looks nice if you've got a balance of published (or accepted) work with a few other papers in the works (or presented), and you include abstracts for each and links either to all or just the published and most well-developed papers. It's especially nice if it shows you have interests in several topics or fields and know what's going on in them.

    Reply
  8. Anon Student

    This is going to sound horrible, but 5's comment about photogenic philosophers made me think… if one is, in fact, quite photogenic, would it be a good idea to put photos on one's website? Desperate times.

    I'm also wondering how common this "scooping" (read: plagiarism) is.

    Reply
  9. Recent hire

    My first year on the job market, I got one TT interview and eventually secured a visiting position in early June (bad year!). This year, I had tons of interviews, four fly-outs, and multiple TT offers. While I have no proof of this, I do think that the addition of a personal website contributed to the better showing in my second year. Stats show that every department which interviewed me visited the website, and some spent a lot of time on it.

    I saw the website as an opportunity to personalize an otherwise abstract and inhuman job application. I did this in two ways:

    First, I didn't simply post my job materials online. I rewrote them in a less abstract and more informal way. The materials were not chatty or sloppy, but geared toward a professor or student who was not an expert in my field. My hope at the time was that this would show committees that I was able to talk about my work with non-experts.

    Second, I did use the website to reveal _some_ personal information in a professional way. I included some hobbies, a few photos (one of me with my parents at commencement), etc. And, apologies to Les Green, but I made it quite clear on my website that I am gay. I thought that this was pertinent information that could not otherwise be easily included in a job file. Pertinent for two reasons (a) I wanted the hiring committee to know that I am and would be involved in the local and campus gay communities, sometimes in a formal (i.e. ends up on the CV) sense but often more informally – this turned out to be a selling point at the school where I accepted my position. (b) If the hiring committee had a problem with that, I did not want them to hire me. I have no desire to accept a job and then later have to move because my colleagues are homophobic.

    Reply
  10. Anon. Grad Student

    I've been told to post no research on my website that is not yet published or forthcoming. If it's polished it should be going out for publication, and so it needs to not be available for googling (otherwise you might lose the benefits blind review confers on relative unknowns like grad students). That means no title, no abstract involving keywords. Nothing. If it's not polished enough to send out it's not how you want to represent yourself anyway, so don't post it then either.

    There don't seem to be any such disincentives to posting teaching materials. If anything you probably hope that other people use them (with appropriate credit of course) rather than worrying about being scooped or googled out of a publication. I can't imagine that a handful of handouts and syllabi would make you out to be too "teaching oriented" for research jobs (though the publication thread maybe shows that idiosyncratic preferences run the gamut), and it could be a real asset when up for teaching posts.

    Reply
  11. Nat Tabris

    I'd like to put in a word on behalf of having a few personal photos on your website: as a younger student, I found it very encouraging to see that other philosophers (well, some of them at least) were regular human beings with outside interests and non-academic ties to other human beings (e.g., families). This of course doesn't address whether it's in one's own interest to post such pictures.

    Reply
  12. Dale Miller

    I wouldn't be deterred from work that has been submitted to journals on a personal website. A potential reviewer will only discover your identity that way if they are cheating, and I'd like to think that that doesn't happen very often. Besides, if the paper title is on your CV, or if you presented it at a conference and there is a conference webpage, the cat will be out of the bag anyway.

    I've never found applicant websites especially useful when I was involved in a search, but I've never seen anything on one of them that lowered my estimation of a candidate either. I did just encourage a former student now going out on the market to keep hers, however, and to start an Academia,edu page in addition. In my mind, the benefit of these is not so much that a search committee might see them but that someone looking for people who work in your area for some other reason might stumble across them. That might get you invited to be a commentator at a conference, invited to review a book, invited to referee a paper, etc. which will give you something else to put on the CV and (indirectly) help you on the market.

    Reply
  13. Landon

    I just have a very simple site that has PDFs of my various application materials. It's clearly a "job-search-site," as it were. Oh, and an RSS feed for Leiter Reports, just to prove I know how.

    Reply
  14. Roman

    So is the shared opinion that it is best to have both a personal website and an academia page? That seems extravagant, especially since they will inevitably, at least in my case, have the same content. Why bother maintaining both? Just to show off how good I am at procrastinating?

    Reply
  15. Dale Miller

    @Roman
    I'd really advise just an Academia.edu page, but I'm a big fan of that site. I'm not sure if my earlier comment was part of what you included in the shared opinion or not, but I had someone write to me who had already done a very slick personal webpage and wanted my opinion on how she might tweak it. Given the work she had already done I advised her to keep it and start an Academia page in addition, but if she had come to me earlier I'd have advised her not to fuss with a personal website.

    Reply
  16. Kenny Easwaran

    When I've been on search committees I found it very helpful if a candidate had a webpage with their search materials, or at least the CV and writing samples. During the search season, I sometimes found myself wanting to read something a candidate had written, and I wasn't on campus in the office where the files are kept. The only reason I wouldn't include a paper on my website is if I think it's not yet ready for random academics to read – and in that case, I probably wouldn't include it as a writing sample either. I remember during my job search, at one of my interviews, a committee member apologized for not having read my writing sample, and then asked if it would be ok to talk about another paper I had on my website. If a committee is interested in you, and especially if they have someone who works on similar topics to you, you should expect that these will get looked at – so be careful with what you include, but it's also a chance to impress people further.

    And "Recent hire" at comment 9 seems to have done what seems ideal to me – have basically all the job material, but re-written in a way that it might interest not just a search committee, but an interested undergrad in one of your classes, or the grad student who is commenting on your paper at an upcoming grad conference, or anyone else. And I would think that a few photos, and a side section about a hobby would be nice for committees (and students and others!) to get some sense of who you are, at least as long as none of it seems potentially offensive.

    I'm not quite as clear how making it quite clear that one is gay would work – it seems that a family picture with one's partner, or a link to his/her own research website, would be natural (speaking of which, I should probably do that myself), but I can't think how else it might work without seeming awkward. Of course, this brings up the other issue of revealing that one has a partner, who may become part of a two-body issue – that's the one common personal issue that probably is worth keeping quiet about during job season.

    Reply
  17. Eli Weber

    I'm curious about this last bit about revealing a potential two-body problem. My website currently includes a photo of me and my son, who is two and rather adorable, and in the "About" section I reveal that I am married. It turns out, incidentally, that I do not have a two-body problem because my wife is a non-academic who works remotely for an international corporation. She can literally work anywhere, so there is no two-body problem for me. The suggestion above seems to imply that I should remove this photo and anecdote about being married, in order to avoid the appearance of a possible two-body problem, even though in my case there isn't one. Do others concur that this is important? That I am married and have a son is a big part of my identity, so concealing that information would involve concealing something pretty important about me, and I assume that's the case for other married or otherwise attached candidates.

    Reply
  18. Paul Remm

    From my experience – NO. It is the kind of thing that at best does no harm. The way people perceive themselves is often very different from the way others perceive them (there are many many examples of this – if you want a very striking one, think of Vincent Hendricks) and, from what I can tell, the image that people often convey of themselves is the opposite from what they intend (instead of cool – dorky, instead of smart – just nerdy, and so on). If there is something you think your search committee should know or read, then you can send it to them. Unless you make it a completely professional site (as at academia.edu), leaving out any personal details.

    Reply
  19. Dale Miller

    @ Eli
    At my school, our knowing that you had a partner and child would not hurt you. At the same time, though, I don't think that removing that information from your professional web page should be thought of as 'concealing" it. No one should expect someone's professional web to give a complete picture of who they are as a person, anymore than they would expect their CV to give such a picture, even if some people do use their pages for this purpose.

    Reply
  20. David Wallace

    It might be useful to consider two related questions: (i) should an active academic researcher have a web site; (ii) what writing should be on it?

    My answers are:
    (i) in the 21st century, absolutely. There is something strange going on if I can't go to Person X's website and download their papers.
    (ii) put writing on your website iff you think it's of publishable quality. That doesn't necessarily mean that you think you can get it into JPhil; it does mean that you are happy for it to be cited and discussed in the literature, potentially years hence. (A website, being a public location, is not an appropriate place to put work-in-progress on which you want sympathetic comments: if you want that kind of feedback, circulate to people individually.)

    Reply
  21. David Wallace

    (Sorry, for clarity: I mean that both questions are related to the question of whether a job-seeker should have a website, not that they are related to each other.)

    Reply
  22. Roman

    Academia has separate sections for papers and presentations. Since presentations are typically papers in progress, or at least less polished and perhaps more conversational than journal pieces, is it still a bad idea to put up work that isn't fully finished, at least in that section?

    Reply
  23. a graduate student

    I don't know whether a blog is counted as a "personal website" in question. I wonder if it's apropriate for a student, rather than a job seeker, to post some fragments of thinking or some reading notes on a blog for discussions/comments.

    I myself use a wordpress-based blog and a mediawiki to help orgnize my own learning and thinking. Some comments above made me worry about it.

    Reply
  24. Dennis

    I also have a blog with my ramblings, bits of papers I'm doing, books I'm reading and snippets from blogs like these. In my view and from where I am based, having a blog like that also helps one keep abreast of significant issues in philosophy. But I don't think that one should be worried about a blog like that. I haven't seen any mention of PhilPapers yet. Would anyone have any input on that?

    Reply
  25. Benedict Eastaugh

    I'm somewhat puzzled at the recommendations for sites like Academia.edu and LinkedIn. While I appreciate that these places offer built-in 'networking' facilities and mean that one doesn't have to learn anything technical, in using them as one's primary academic web presence one is handing over control of one's professional identity to a third party whose goals are far from guaranteed to be aligned with one's own.

    If nothing else there is the obvious threat that they may go out of business and leave one's web identity untethered, so to speak. They might also decide to run adverts against your profile, sell your data to other companies, and so on. With a personal website on one's own domain there is a level of control and security that can't be obtained from these other services. Convenience and ubiquity are benefits, but they should be weighed against other considerations, not taken as overriding reasons for action.

    Reply

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